On October 15, during the OSCE ODIHR Human Dimension Conference held in Warsaw, Daniel Ioannisyan, Program Coordinator of the \u201cUnion of Informed Citizens\u201d NGO, delivered a speech addressing the situation in the region and Azerbaijan\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n
Ioannisyan emphasized that the Azerbaijani leadership uses humanitarian and refugee issues as a tool to make territorial claims against Armenia. He underlined that the Azerbaijani authorities are not interested in refugees or human lives – only in territories.<\/p>\n
The text of Daniel Ioannisyan\u2019s speech is provided below:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are two heads of states in the OSCE region for whom the main indicator of success is gaining lands. They both gain lands without souls. They both do not care about the lives of their citizens, as well as of citizens of neighboring countries.<\/p>\n
I’m talking about Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev. But only one of those two is sending representatives here to talk about humanitarian issues and refugees in a way that it becomes a tool of creating territorial claims against another country. And that’s Ilham Aliyev.<\/p>\n
Azerbaijani state agencies are organizing events here, during which, while\u00a0 discussing humanitarian and refugee issues, proceed to name Armenian villages and regions as Azerbaijani lands. They’re very clearly exploiting the decades old refugee problem, turning it into territorial claims toward Armenia.<\/p>\n
The second irony, ladies and gentlemen, is that these narratives are being disseminated by a state that perpetrated an ethnic cleansing of Armenians just two years ago.<\/p>\n
Just two years ago, more than 100,000 Armenians were forced to become refugees, fleeing their homes and leaving their entire lives due to the state-orchestrated ethnic cleansing carried out by Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n